Ray is lured on not simply because he is a guy and she is a girl. It is just that Mirabelle’s body, as he will soon discover, is his absolute aphrodisiac. His intuition sensed it, led him to the fourth floor, and has been reinforced with every whiff and accidental touch. He deduced it from the sight of her, and from the density of her hair and the length of her fingers, and from the phosphorus underglow of her skin. And tonight, he will feel the beginning of an addiction that he cannot break, the endless push and pull of an intoxication that he suspects he should avoid but cannot resist.
He puts both hands on the sides of her neck, but she stiffens. She says it makes her nervous. This takes a bit of undoing, and he breaks from her, makes a few irrelevant comments, and resumes. They get on the bed and dally, a mesh of buttons and buckles and shoes clashing and gnashing. This time he buries his face in her neck and draws in his breath, inhaling her natural perfume. This gets the appropriate response. A few clothes are removed.
They are relaxed. They are not on a straight path to intercourse, as they take talking breaks, joking breaks, adjusting-the-music breaks. Things intensify, then ebb, then reheat. After a few minutes with Ray exploring the landscape of her bare stomach, he takes a bathroom break and disappears through a doorway.
Mirabelle stands up and methodically takes off all her clothes. Then she lies face down on the bed and smiles to herself. Because Mirabelle knows she is revealing her most secret and singular asset.
Mirabelle’s body is not extravagant. It does not flirt, or call out, and that causes men who care about drama to shop elsewhere. But, when viewed at the radius of a king-sized bed, or held in the hands, or manipulated for pleasure, it is a small spectacle of perfection.
Ray enters the bedroom and sees her. Her skin looks like it has faint micro lights under it, glowing from rose to white. Her breasts peek out from her sides as they are flattened against the sheets, and the line of her body rises and falls in gentle waves. He walks over and puts his hand on her lower back, lingers there, then rolls her over, kisses her neck, runs his hand down her legs and in between, then touches her breasts, then kisses her mouth while he cups her vagina until it opens, then he eats her, makes love to her, as safely as the moment allows. Again she thinks how different this is from Vermont. Then he faces her away from him and brings his body up next to hers. Mirabelle, fetal, curled up like a bug, receives the proximity of Ray Porter as though it were a nourishing stream. They wake in the morning on either side of the bed.
breakfast
AT BREAKFAST, EARLY BECAUSE SHE has to get to work, Mirabelle becomes age seven. She sits, waiting to be served. Ray Porter gets the juice, makes the coffee, sets the plates, toasts the bread, and pours the cereal. He gets the paper. Mirabelle is so dependent, she could have used a nanny to hold open her mouth and spoon-feed her the oat bran. She speaks in one-word sentences, which requires Ray to fill the silences with innocuous queries, like an adult trying to break through to a disinterested teenager. In this snapshot of their morning is hidden the definition of their coming relationship, which Ray Porter will come to understand almost two years later.
“You like your breakfast?” Ray decides to try a topic that is in both their immediate vision.
“Yeah.”
“What do you usually have for breakfast?”
“A bagel.”
“Where do you get bagels?”
“There’s a shop around the corner from me.”
Total dead end. He starts over.
“You’re in great shape.”
“Yoga,” she says.
“I love your body,” he says.
“I have my mother’s rear end. Like two small basket-balls covered over in flesh, that’s what she said once, on a car trip.” She emits a little chuckle. Ray gets an odd look on his face, and Mirabelle reads him and she says the only funny thing of the morning:
“Don’t worry, she’s older than you are.”
He wants to reach over and slide his hand in between the opening in the robe that he has lent her. He wants to relive last night, to trace his hands over her breasts, to analyze and codify and confirm their exact beauty, but he doesn’t. This will take place on another night with dinner and wine and walking and talking, where the seduction is not assumed, and the outcome undetermined. His sexual motor is already whirring and purring for their next date.
Ray’s libido is exactly twenty-four hours ahead of his reason, and tomorrow at this time he will recollect that Mirabelle became quite helpless in the morning and wonder about it (his mind works slowly when it comes to women; he often does not know that he has been insulted, slighted, or manipulated until months or sometimes years later). But since he does not know what to expect from a woman – his four years of dating have not really educated him – he accepts Mirabelle’s morning behavior passively. Ray’s former experience has been with tough-minded, outgoing, vital, ambitious women, who, when displeased, attack. Mirabelle’s dull inertia draws him into a peaceful place, a calm female cushion of acceptance.
He drives Mirabelle home, just in time for her to get ready and be late for work.
jeremy’s adulthood
THE STENCIL ADHERES TO THE amplifier by manila tape, and Jeremy has learned to evenly apply the paint in one skillful squirt of the airbrush. The Doggone Amplifier Company has a logo of a dog with cartoon speed lines trailing out behind it, with the brand name laid out in a semicircle underneath. It is not easy to fill in the delicate speed lines; some of the earlier paint jobs, before Jeremy joined the ranks, are uneven and sloppy. When he works he crouches in an uncomfortable position that only someone under thirty could bear for long before he would have to seek work elsewhere. His salary is so small that his paycheck could read so and so measly dollars and no one would contradict. But it’s Jeremy’s work clothes that tell the story of his line of business: his jeans look like a Jackson Pollock and his T-shirt looks like a Helen Frankenthaler – he is working at the bottom end of the arts.
His boss, Chet, ambles through the warehouse with a client in tow, and their faint muffled voices waft over the stacks of amps to Jeremy’s straining ears. He catches a glimpse of them and notices that the client is a sharply dressed businessman, presumably the manager of a rock band trying to make a deal for a ton of amplification in exchange for promotion. The problem in the negotiation, of course, is that Chet only wants to sell amps, and the manager only wants them for free. There is no middle ground. Chet’s business is waterlogged and about to sink and he simply can’t afford to ship out fifteen thousand dollars worth of equipment for use months later. The manager slips away with a handshake and Chet stands there as the Mercedes disappears out of the lot through the chain-link fence.
For Christopher Columbus, it was the sailing of three ships that launched his life’s great journey. For Jeremy, it is the sight of the sinking Chet watching the ass-end of a hundred-thousand-dollar car shrink to a vanishing point down an industrial street in Pacoima. He lays down his spray gun and gets in Chet’s field of vision.
“You know what I was thinkin’?”
“What was that?” Chet barely replies.
“You know who hangs out with rock musicians when they’re on the road?”
“Who?” says Chet.
“Other rock musicians.”
“And?”
“If you had someone on the road with one of the bands using our stuff, someone who looks sharp, like that guy does…“ he thumbs in the direction of the dust of the Mercedes, “…someone the musicians could relate to, I bet you could sell a lot more amps.”
“Do you have someone in mind?”
“Me.”